The Challenge for Coaching in the 21st Century Published as: Hawkins, P. (2014c) The Challenge for Coaching in the 21st Century in e-Organisations and People, Vol 21(4), Winter 2014, www.amed.org.uk

Professor Peter Hawkins

[Keywords] Transformational Coaching, Systemic Team Coaching, Coaching

Culture, New Paradigm Coaching, Coach Supervision

The Context The Coaching industry/profession has had a meteoric rise over the last 35 years and

now is a sizeable market estimated to be worth over $1.5 Billion dollars worldwide. In a

recent survey by Henley Business School (Henley 2014) when asked what they saw as

the biggest challenge for their company in the next three years, the highest quoted

challenge was “Overall Leadership Capability”, identified by 71% of the respondents.

When asked what they as a company were going to be doing in 2014 to respond to this

challenge, the highest response was “Individual Coaching” (83%) and the second highest

was “Team Coaching” (55%).

Coaching has also achieved a great deal through this period of its expansion, both in its

international spread and the breadth of its use, and in its professionalization (Lane et al

2014). However, in this paper I will argue that what has helped coaching have such a

phenomenal rise in popularity will not be sufficient for it to continue to flourish in the

next thirty-five years. To plagiarise the title of Marshall Goldsmith’s 2007 book on

leadership: “What got us to here, will not get us to there!”

The Future Challenges The 21st century has been characterised as the world becoming increasingly V.U.C.A.:

that is volatile, unpredictable, complex and ambiguous. I often describe the unholy

trinity that every organisation faces – the challenge “to do more, at higher quality with

less resource.” This is a global phenomenon. The world’s population has trebled in my

own lifetime from 2.4 Billion in 1950 to the current 7.2 Billion and is predicted to rise to

between 9 and 10 Billion by 2050. This is unprecedented since the dawn of our species.

At the same time the speed and spread of the internet and mobile telephony and the

media have made us more instantaneously interconnected than ever before. This means

that we have accelerated expectations of people’s needs and consumption even faster

than the population. The rest now know what the best already have and want to catch

up. The combination of the rise in population and of human consumption means that we

are already using more of the Earth’s resources per year than the earth produces and so

we are constantly using up our Natural capital and leaving a legacy of a less resourced

Earth. Hence the unholy trinity of: doing more, at higher quality with less resource, is

not a product of a short term economic recession but rather a long-term species-wide

challenge.

The level of complexity that needs to be embraced by all organisational leaders has

accelerated faster than leadership has developed its capability to deal with this

enormous challenge. Many organisations now report that the gap in leadership capacity

required for the future is their number one challenge (Henley Corporate Survey 2014).

Coaching, leader development and leadership development

One of the biggest areas of coaching provision is as part of the wider leadership

development industry, in which over $14bn worldwide was spent on leadership

development in last four years. Despite this, only one in three leaders value the

development they receive, and only 18% of HR specialists feel that their companies have

the quality/quantity of leaders needed to run the firm in three to five years. (Boatman

and Wellins 2011).

Elsewhere (Hawkins 2014a and 2014b) I have argued that the era of the heroic

individual leader is over and we need much higher levels of collective leadership and

more effective leadership teams. Yet most development and indeed coaching is focussed

on leader development not leadership development.

For coaching to be successful in the 21st century and for coaching to make a valuable

contribution to the growing challenges for the Earth, the human species, organisations

and organisational leaders, I would suggest that it needs a quantum step change that

includes four important areas that future coaching needs to address:

• A new paradigm of coaching, less focussed on the personal development

of the individual and more on what the future and the individual’s

stakeholders need different from the individual.

• Transformational coaching that goes beyond insight and good

intentions to creating a shift in patterns of feeling and core assumptions

of the coachee and embodied learning.

• The further development of systemic team coaching that helps teams at

all levels to collectively transform how they create value for their

stakeholders.

• The further development of coaching cultures in organisations that turn

individual and team learning into organisational and systemic learning

and stakeholder value creation.

I will now address these four important areas for the development of coaching going

forward.

The new paradigm in Coaching. For coaching to step up to the very different world of the 21st century and continue to

make an impactful contribution, it needs to radically reconsider the questions: “Who or

what does Coaching serve?” I would argue that the inter-connected challenges facing the

world require the human species to learn and develop faster than can be achieved one

person at a time. One of the foundations of coaching, that of individual client centred

development, is now one of its major limiting beliefs. Coaching has enabled much

individual growth and development but this is now insufficient at best and at worst

becomes a narcissistic enterprise.

Recently I was working with the City of Cape Town on how it is developing a coaching

culture.

Cape Town: Restaurant and Market

We had sixty people in the room and were exploring the tremendous efforts the City has

made to develop different types of coaching in its organisations. I set up a number of

people to be the stakeholders of the City’s local government. These included: Service

users; Tax payers; Employees from the City including - Senior Executives; Middle

Managers; and front-line workers; and a few people representing the collective

grandchildren, those who will inherit the long-term consequences of the decisions that

are made today.

At regular intervals, I would stop the exploration of the presentation on the coaching

culture and ask for feedback from the stakeholders. At the first round of comments, the

person representing the front-line workers said:

“The senior executives already have the big salaries, the best offices; the best

travel arrangements and now they are the ones getting the coaching. To me it

sounds like coaching is another privilege for the over-privileged. What is your

coaching-culture doing for me?”

This led to a very useful exploration of how the limited number of internal coaches could

use some of their time coaching project teams, that were drawn from all levels of the

work-force as well as including stakeholders. These project teams would address the

future cross-functional challenges for the City and region of Cape Town.

Even in coaching sessions for individual executives there should never be just two

people’s concerns present. A new paradigm is needed where the coach should not be a

supplier focussing on the individual needs of the coachee as their customer, but rather

the coach should go shoulder to shoulder with the coachee, both facing the needs of the

coachee’s stakeholders, including: the coachee’s direct and indirect reports, their

colleagues and fellow team members, the people they report to, their investors,

customers, suppliers, the communities in which they operate and the more than human

world who’s resources support us daily.

Coaching is not done by the coach but is a joint enterprise, involving multiple

stakeholders.

Transformational Coaching Having been involved in the development and growth of Coaching Supervision, the

faculty of the Bath Consultancy Group International Coaching Supervision Training

(http://www.cstdbath.co.uk/certificate-in-supervision), we reviewed in 2005 some of

the oft repeating patterns in supervising coaches. We discovered that the most common

pattern was for coaches to come to supervision and report that they had a great coaching

session where that had been an “aha moment” of insight, and this had led to the coachee

planning how they would act differently back at work. The coach would then express

their frustration that the coachee came back a month later and had failed to follow-

through on their planned action. What was most interesting and also worrying was that

the coaches would frequently blame the client: “they clearly were not committed”; “they

allowed other events to overcome their important intentions”.

We explored how supervision could help coaches turn the spotlight back on what the

coach and coaching could do differently to interrupt this frustration loop. We were

reminded of the old saying: “The road to hell is paved with good intentions”. We were

convinced that insight and good intentions framed as an action plan, although often an

important part of coaching, were insufficient by themselves to create effective change.

From the studying of the latest writing on the neuro-sciences (Brown, P and Brown, V.

(2012); Hall and Duval (2004); Lewis, T; Amini, F. & Lannon, R. (2000)), we realised that

actions and insights can often be made from the left hemisphere of the neo-cortex,

whereas learning that leads to transformational change involves more parts of the brain

and to be enacted involves the body.

If as coaches we stop at the point of insight and good intention, we have not done what is

necessary to support effective change. We need to help the coaching move the learning

from the intellectual centre to embodied learning. The most effective way we have

discovered to do this, is to create embodied experiments and “fast-forward rehearsals”

live in the coaching session. Once the coachee has planned to have a different meeting

with a key individual and agreed what they need to address and when they will do it, we

move beyond them explaining how they are going to do this, to showing how they will

do it differently through rehearsing the future meeting live in the session. This change in

our coaching and in the coaching of the many coaches we have trained and supervised

has led to a large increase in the percentage of planned change that actually happens.

We have defined Transformational Coaching as being:

“in service of transforming our fundamental assumptions, core beliefs and

motivations that drive our emotional and behavioural patterns, so we can increase

our capacity to respond to the challenges that life is constantly providing.”

by focussing on:

• Working in partnership in service of the world beyond the direct client

• Attending to four levels of engagement (see Figure 1 below)

• Listening beyond the story to the frame, patterns and assumptions

• Moving beyond insight and good intention to an embodied shift in being –

using fast forward rehearsals

• Unlearning as well as learning

• Working systemically – realising the shift needs to start in the relationship

in the room.” (Hawkins and Smith 2014: 228-243)

Our model on four levels of engagement helps coaches reflect on how much of their

coaching do they spend focussing on the facts, or even on the behaviours, and how much

on exploring the emotional patterns and core assumptions that create the story we are

telling ourselves and the behaviours we manifest.

Figure One: The four levels of engagement here:

Systemic Team Coaching One of the fastest growing areas in coaching is systemic team coaching (Hawkins 2011,

2014a and 2014b) a new craft that is a hybrid of the best of coaching and the best of

organisational development. This growth is partly driven by an increasing awareness

that the complexity of modern organisational life has increased to a level where

individual leadership is no longer the answer (Ryder 2011) and that there is a much

greater need for collective leadership. However, too often leadership teams function at

less than the sum of their parts. The research on leadership teams shows that while

traditional team building that focuses on internal team functioning and interpersonal

relationships may be partially helpful, it does not by itself create high performing teams

(Wageman 2001, Wageman et al. 2008 and Katzenbach and Smith 1993a and 1993b).

Much more emphasis needs to be focussed on how the team collectively engages with its

commissioners and its multiple stakeholders (Hawkins 2014a and 2014b).

In Hawkins (2014: 80) I defined systemic team coaching as:

‘a process by which a team coach works with a whole

team, both when they are together and when they are

apart, in order to help them improve both their

collective performance and how they work together,

and also how they develop their collective leadership to

more effectively engage with all their key stakeholder

groups to jointly transform the wider business’.

In Hawkins 2014b, there are many case studies that show the journey of many different

teams and how they develop to create better measurable value for their stakeholders

assisted by systemic team coaching, often delivered jointly by the systemic team coach

and the internal team leader.

Creating a Coaching Culture I met with a senior Human Resources Director who proudly told me how they had a

strong panel of external coaches, developed and trained a community of internal

coaches, and had trained many of their managers with coaching skills. I told her I was

impressed and then asked her how many coaching conversations did she think took

place every week in her organisation? She replied, there must be thousands worldwide.

I then asked her how her organisation learnt from those thousands of coaching

conversations. She looked shocked and had no answer. Many people confuse a coaching

culture to mean an organisation where a lot of coaching takes place. These two are not

the same thing. For a coaching culture is not just about coaching inputs, but also about

the alignment of these inputs to create individual, team, organisation and wider system

value creating change.

In 2012 I defined a Coaching Culture as:

“A coaching culture exists in an organisation when a coaching approach is a key aspect

of how the leaders, managers and staff engage and develop all their people

and engage their stakeholders, in ways that create increased individual, team and

organisational performance and shared value for all stakeholders.” (Hawkins 2012:21)

Too often coaching can be seen as an end in itself rather than as a means to an end. For

an organisation to really benefit from coaching it needs to develop a coaching strategy

that starts with the end in mind. This needs to begin with the organisation’s strategy

based on its understanding of how its current and future stakeholders need to develop to

create greater value for all stakeholders. This strategic understanding can then address

how the organisation’s culture, and within that its leadership culture, needs to be

different to deliver this strategic development. Only then can it address the question:

“How can coaching most effectively assist this necessary cultural development?

No longer is it enough for coaches just to deliver coaching that is valued by the individual

coachee. Coaching needs also to deliver organisational learning and development and

value to the coachee’s stakeholders as well as eventually to the organisation’s

stakeholders. Coaching needs to have a much stronger systemic orientation (Hawkins

2014 and Hawkins 2011b) This means practically that coaches are coaching more than

two people in the same organisation, they should ensure there is some mechanism for

feeding back some of the cultural patterns that they discover go beyond personal and

interpersonal dynamics, while preserving the appropriate confidentiality. Organisations,

like the one mentioned above that have a great deal of coaching activity, should establish

mechanisms for harvesting the organisational learning (Hawkins 2012:99-103).

Conclusion Success as a company or a profession has many dangers. These include complacency,

which can in turn become arrogance; less motivation to change and adapt; and a failure

to notice that the ecological niche in which you operate is changing faster than you are.

The business literature is full of cases where so called excellent companies who were

leaders in their market, failed to adapt and their success fell off a cliff. If you are number

one in your sector, you are the slower than less successful companies to have the

changes in the wider market impact on your financial performance. Olivetti were market

leaders in typewriters, IBM in mainframe computers, Kodak in print photography, Tesco

in supermarket retail, yet all were blinded by their success to see the changes in their

wider ecology. If you are a market dominator you need to be actively listening to and

engaging with your wider stakeholder ecology to create the market that is needed for

tomorrow.

Coaching has been very successful but is in danger of being blinded by its success and

can often be too much focussed on the past and internally. I wrote about the future

challenges for coaching in 2008 (Hawkins 2008) and since then these challenges have

both changed and grown. Coaching, that has now become a global profession, needs to

“lean into the future” (Scharmer and Kaufman 2013) and discover “What it can uniquely

do that the world of tomorrow needs.” (Hawkins 2005). I hope that this article has made

a small contribution to that large endeavour.

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Brown, P and Brown, V (2012). Neuropsychology for coaches. 1st ed, Open University Press, Maidenhead

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Hall, L. M., and Duval, M. (2004). Meta-Coaching: Volume 1: Coaching Change for Higher Levels of Success and Transformation. Clifton, USA: Neuro-Semantics Publications.

Hawkins, P. (Edited) (2014b). “Leadership Team Coaching in Practice”. London: Kogan Page

Hawkins, P. (2012). “Creating a Coaching Culture” Maidenhead: Open University Press/McGraw Hill. (translated into Dutch)

Hawkins, P. (2014a, first edition 2011). “Leadership Team Coaching: Developing Collective Transformational Leadership ”. London: Kogan Page (translated into Spanish and Japanese)

Hawkins, P. (2011b). Systemic Coaching Supervision. In Bachkirova, T. Jackson, P. and Clutterbuck, D. Supervision in Mentoring and Coaching: Theory and Practice. Maidenhead: Open University Press

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Hawkins, P. and Smith, N. (2014, first edition 2006). Transformational Coaching. In: “The Complete Handbook of Coaching” Edited by Cox, E., Bachkirova, T. and Clutterbuck, D., pp 231-244 London: Sage

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Katzenbach, J. R. & Smith, D, K, (1993a), ‘The Discipline of teams’. Harvard Business Review, 71, pp. 111- 121

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Lane, D.; Steiter, R. & Stout-Rostron, S. (2014). The Future of Coaching as a Profession. In: “The Complete Handbook of Coaching” Edited by Cox, E., Bachkirova, T. and Clutterbuck, D., pp 231-244, London: Sage

Lewis, T, Amini, F., & Lannon, R. (2000). A General Theory of Love, Random House, New York

Ryder, J. (July 2011) “The Heroic CEO is dead”. Feature on Peter Hawkins and Collective Team Leadership.” HR Business Network.

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Wageman, R. (2001), ‘How leaders foster self-managing team effectiveness: Design choices versus hands on coaching’. Organisation Science, 12, pp. 559-577

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About the author

Professor Peter Hawkins is Professor of Leadership at Henley Business School and

Emeritus Chairman of Bath Consultancy Group and writes and lectures prolifically in the

fields of Coaching, Systemic Team Coaching and Coach Supervision. He is the author of

many books and papers in the fields of coaching, leadership and change including

Leadership Team Coaching in Practice (to be published autumn 2014), Coaching,

Mentoring and Organizational Consultancy: Supervision, Skills and Development (with

Nick Smith), McGraw-Hill/Open University Press, (2nd ed, 2013); Creating a Coaching

Culture, McGraw Hill, 2012; Leadership Team Coaching, Kogan Page; 2011 (2nd ed

2014); and The Wise Fool’s Guide to Leadership, O Books, 2005. You can contact Peter

via E-mail: peter.hawkins@renewalassociates.co.uk.

Figure One:

Habitual Patterns of Behaviour

Reactive Personal Feelings

Assumptions, Values, Stories I tell myself, Motivational Roots

Facts